In the immediate
aftermath of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and Mistra in 1460 the
Morea was thrown into confusion. Although Byzantine rule was over the
initial Ottoman hold was fragile and the existence of a patchwork of Venetian
coastal territories only added to the instability of the area. Each faction
used local soldiery on a mercenary basis, paying them on a particularly
sporadic basis with coin and grain. The mounted troops, usually Greeks
or Albanians were called 'stratioti' and served under 'capi' or Captains.
These were often clan or family leaders. Due to the tenuous nature of
contracts and the elusiveness of pay these relatively small bands of soldiery
switched sides and often turned to banditry starting a tradition which
bedevilled the Greek countryside until the end of the nineteenth century.

The Kladas
revolt

The Venetians
continued to hold Korone and Methone and Nauplion in the Morea. They also
appointed a series of 'rettori' or governors to Mani, especially during
the exhausting Venetian-Ottoman War of 1463-1478, and assumed possession
of the peninsula. When Mehmet the Conqueror invaded the Peloponnese in
the late 1450s he had met some resistance but had pragmatically offered
those who submitted to Ottoman rule a continuance of their local power
and influence. The Kladas clan were important 'Capi' in the Outer Mani
and they were described as 'Reis' or 'Capo' of Zygos - an area somewhat
contiguous with the present day 'dimos' of Lefktron. The family had a
long history of importance in southern Morea and also had a presemce on
the Elos plain in Lakonia on the eastern side of the Taygetos. Although
the Kladas family submitted to Mehmet, and in reward were given the castle
of Vardounia and the territories it commanded, they soon switched sides
to the Venetians and placed Vardounia and possibly parts of the Outer
Mani under the rule of the Serenissima on the condition that they ran
the area. They were highly praised by the contemporary Venetian commentator
and Provveditor of the Morea, Jacomo Barbarigo along the following lines,

" The
brave ser Manoli Kladas and Krokondilos his brother...are indeed the most
loyal servants of Your Signoria. They have never made excuse of weariness
or of any danger, and they continue to hold the castle of Vordounia, near
Mistra, the key to the Mani. They have lost all their relatives in Your
Signoria's service, and have sustained every labour and loss in your name."

The Kadas
clan fought off a major attempt by the Ottomans to take Mani in 1477 and
it was therefore more than slightly annoying to them when Venice, financially
exhausted by the war with the Ottomans, sought a peace treaty with the
Sublime Porte. Although Venice held on to Nauplion, Methone and Korone
they had perforce to relinquish their claims to Mani and Vardounia thus
putting Krokondilos Kladas' and other Greek Capi's noses strongly out
of joint. Kladas and other bands of stratioti (at least four of which
had the Palaiologos family name) took refuge at Korone where the Venetians
attempted to placate their hurt pride and retain their services by means
of pay and honours. This eventually came to nought.

On October
9 1480 Krokondilos Kladas and others rode out of Korone and had soon retaken
large swathes of the Outer Mani from the Ottomans seizing the castles
of Megalo Maini and Itilo. It was obvious that the Ottomans' had presumed
that the conditions of the 'ahd-name' (truce or peace treaty) would be
adhered to and had withdrawn many troops from the area leaving fortresses
skimpily garrisoned. The Venetians tried to do a nifty piece of damage
limitation by declaring Krokondilos an outlaw and putting a price of 10,000
ducats on his head. In their eyes he had not only committed treason but
was jeopardising the entire peace treaty and the stabilty desperately
needed in the area. The problem was that the Venetians had little in the
way of troops themselves, save other bands of Stratioti who were of similar
Greek or Albanian origin and therefore rarely enthusiastic in hunting
down their own.

In the face
of this blustering but inneffectual Venetian response and with a widening
circle of districts of the Morea in open revolt Mehmet sent a Bey with
a large force to quel the rebellion. They received a bloody defeat in
February 1481 somewhere in the pass between Passavas and Itilo at the
hands of Kladas' forces. A month later a much more impressive force under
Ahmed Bey pushed Kladas further into deep Mani as far as Porto Quaglio
(Porto Kaiyo) Here, and it is debatable whether it was fortuitous or planned,
Kladas made rendevous with three galleys of Ferdinand, King of Naples
and Sicily. There was an abortive rearguard attack on the Ottoman force
before the galleys and Kladas escaped to Naples on 7 April 1481.

Some historians
have seen fit to portray the Kladas episode as either the last gasp of
Byzantine Greek resistance to the Ottomans or as the beginning of a glorious
tradition of Mani and the Maniates as the constant thorn in the side of
the Ottoman power in the Morea. In fact it was probably neither and modern
constructs and ideas of nationalism and freedom fighters would have been
incomprehensible to the 15th century protagonists. What we can observe
is one waning Levantine power, Venice, and the crescent power in ascendant,
the Ottoman Empire, disregarding local seigneurial sensibilities for the
sake of diplomacy, economic stability and realpolitik. The aforementioned
locals, not unsurprisingly taking advantage of the remoteness and harshness
of the area, then reacted violently to get back their castles and fiefdoms.
Indeed after serving various western masters as a mercenary Kladas returned
from exile a few years later when things had quitened down and retook
Vardounia castle. He was eventually killed in a battle at Monemvasia in
1490. His son continued to struggle to hold the area and seized Mani in
the name of the Venetians - again, when Venice was forced to make peace
with the Ottomans, Mani was handed back to the Sublime Porte in 1503.

(Much of
the above detail about the Kladas revolt is taken from Diana Wright's
excellent and exhaustive study of the despatches of the Venetian Governor
of Nauplion at this time. See Wright, Diana Gilliland, Bartolomeo
Minio: Venetian Administration in 15th century Nauplion. EJOS, III,
No. 5. Available as a downloadable pdf
document from the EJOS site i.e.click here)

A
Venetian map showing an attack by Venetian galleys from Candia (Crete)
on Turkish fortifications and forces in deep Mani. The map is from the
1570s and probably depicts a contemporay conflict.
It is deeply inaccurate and the matter of speculation by historians of
cartography and Mani.

The Ottoman
Centuries

The Ottoman
domination of the Balkans lasted for over 350 years and is still perceived
by many Greeks as a time of shame and woe - to the extent that it is only
in the last few decades that serious academic studies of the time have
been undertaken. Indeed the study of the period has recently preferred
the term Ottoman period in an attempt to exclude the ethnic association
with the Turks. Although run by Turkish rulers the Ottoman Empire was
remarkably polyglot. It is true that the Ottomans were capricious, cruel
and more often than not arbitrarily brutish in their attitudes to their
subjects and that cultural life was, certainly in the earlier centuries,
stifled. Greece, apart from the Ionian islands, Crete and some other far
flung locations missed out on the High Renaissance (although it can be
claimed that much of that which invigorated the Renaissance stemmed from
Ancient Hellenic philosophy) and her isolation as part of the Ottoman
Empire ensured that for the most part she was untouched by the Enlightenment
as well.

That said
there was an indifference in the Ottoman gaze which meant that as long
as taxes and levies kept on coming in and various irksome formal divisions
between Christian and Muslim were adhered to there was little fundamental
interference in the day to day life of the ordinary people. If anything
the Ottomans were eventually disliked most for the day to day tax, bureaucratic
and over officious administrative burdens they imposed upon their polyglot
empire. One has, however, to avoid the temptation of succumbing to 'orientalism'
which portrays the Ottoman Empire in lurid and exotic detail concentrating
on decadence and cruelty - as if the contemporary western states had not
equally appalling features and ignoring the Ottomans' complex infrastructure
which sustained the Empire for nearly four centuries.

Although
some Turks did settle in Greece, a proportion of Greeks converted to Islam
- it made life that much more convenient - and mosques dotted the landscape,
the Orthodox Church maintained an uneasy truce with the Sublime Porte.
The Patriarch of Constantinople was still the spiritual leader of the
Greek people. In fact the power invested by the Turks on the Greek Patriarch
in Constantinople under the system of the 'Rum Millet' was such that the
Patriarchs were often vehemently opposed to any insurrections against
the Ottomans. The Rum Millet ('Millet' was derived from the Persian word
for 'nation' and was the term used by the Turks to describe a religious
group within their empire - Rum referred to the Greek term for themselves
'Romaio') ensured that the Orthodox church held its grip on the Balkans
far more strongly than under the Byzantines. Although a number of Turkish
words have entered the Greek language Greece's educational system, its
ethos and beliefs remained the purlieu of the local orthodox Papas.

Turkish
military and officials

In large
parts of mountainous Greece a continuous grumbling level of violence persisted.
Brigandage and guerrilla warfare was endemic and the forays of foreign
powers into the Peloponnese (mainly the Venetians but later on the Russians)
tended to exacerbate the already volatile situation. Klephts - literally
'Thieves' - the descendants of the medieval 'stratioti', haunted the hills
and mountains in irregular bands . To call them freedom fighters is an
anachronistic misnomer for - at least in the earlier centuries - most
were out and out bandits without even the vague excuse of fighting for
the greater cause of Greek independence or irredentism.

To control
these gangs the Turks raised local troops called Armatoli, although the
use of this term would seem to have a looser meaning in the Morea than
in Roumeli (northern Greece). More often than not the same individuals
or groups would switch seamlessly from Klephtic Band to Armatoli and back
again dependent on the local conditions and the whims of the local Pasha
- many of whom were of Greek stock even though they had Turkish names.
A background in Klephtic pursuits seems to have been no obstacle to later
legitimate power (or vice versa). The very first Bey of Mani in the 1680s,
was the 'former' pirate Lemperaki and many of the later "heroes"
of the Greek War of Independence began their careers as cattle thieves.
Unsurprisingly, with this level of incipient violence, not only were the
Balkans an area of cultural stagnation but also of relative economic inefficiency
and torpor.

Mani -
a separate society?

In Mani things
were subtly different. Although it is difficult to assess the Turkish
presence in large parts of Greece due to the obliteration of all physical
signs of them in the fury of the 1821 uprising, in Mani it would seem
the Ottomans only ever managed to effect temporary military occupation
and rarely seem to have been able to sustain a viable civilian infrastructure.
The skills of the Melingi and Maniates in resisting Byzantine and Frankish
domination was passed down through the generations and, with the Taygetus
and Sangias mountains to defend and isolate them from the mass of the
Peloponnese, Mani developed a distinct identity. It is important not to
over-stress these differences. The Maniates were Greek and the external
differences between them and a Greek under Turkish rule was small. As
John Galt observed in the early 1800s the , " dress of the
men was pretty much like that of the common Greeks, but closer fitted
and better calculated for efforts of activity".

It is during
the Ottoman period that the distinctive Maniate urban landscape appeared.
The towers (pyrgi, pyrgos is the singular) that rise like small Manhattan
skylines above the villages of Mani and which punctuate the air with their
bleak, often unwindowed starkness are relatively unique in Greek secular
architecture though it is clear that such fortified dwellings were found
in other parts of the Peloponnese dependent on the prevaling levels of
violence in society. What is certain is that the proliferation of the
towers and the vendetta based society which created and lived in them
in Mani has few parallels in Mediterranean societies. The origins of the
towers is still debated. We have little hard evidence of them and the
societal structures which accompanied them from before the 17th century.
Certainly by the 1670s when Evliya Celebi, the Turkish traveller and official
visited Mani the Exo Mani was full of villages with houses which Evliya
describes as, "like castles with loop-holes for windows."
Interestingly although he mentions these in nearly every village he visited
in Outer Mani he fails to record the same architectural forms in Deep
Mani where, today, their remains are far more prevalent.

There are
similar towers in the remote Svaneti district of the Caucusus - generally
dated to the middle ages, but there are no known links with Mani. One
theory is that the idea for the towers was imported by returning Greek
mercenaries from the 15th/16th century Italian wars where they would have
come into contact with such similar architectural and societal structures
as those at San Gimignano in Tuscany where some of the towers are still
extant. What is certain is that such an unlawful and squabbling population
would not have been tolerated by any strong central government and the
Ottomans' sway over Mani was at best insecure and often completely absent.
Therefore one can conceive of the Mani's war-tower society as being less
a reaction to or defense against Turkish oppression and more as a consequence
of the slack nature of the Ottoman power in the peninsula.

At various
points in the next centuries the Turks would send forces into Mani in
punitive raids and would attempt to levy taxes with mixed results. There
are those who, rather romantically, think that Mani never paid any taxes
and can point to Leake's report that before the Orlov rebellion of 1770
the Maniates were taxed, " a nominal tribute of 15 purses,
which they never paid.". But it is clear that both Turkish and
Venetian rulers drew up regular tax assessment registers and as Prof.
Malcolm Wagstaff points out one doesn't keep on tax assessing if one's
got little chance of collecting. Indeed Bernard Randolph writing in the
1680s reported that the Maniates agreed to pay a, 'small Tribute'
after the Turkish incursion of 1669. How draconian these tax demands were
is more doubtful. Sir William Gell wrote of his visit to Kitries in 1804
when Antonbey Grigorakis was paying his taxes the following. "It
seems that the Greek Bey is acknowledged by the Turks, under the name
Andun or Andunah Bey " (the Turkish version of Antonis)
" on condition that he should pay the annual tribute of thirty-five
purses to the Porte." Gell calculated that this amounted to the
equivalent of 500 English Pounds. Even allowing for changes in the real
value of sterling in the intervening two hundred years one cannot help
but agree with Gell when he wrote, "This sum, divided among the
hundred and seventeen towns and villages of Maina, could not be considered
as any great burthen on the community."

The Turks
also settled large numbers of (mainly) Muslim Albanians in the area known
as Vardounia (or Bardounia) just north of Passavas on the south eastern
flanks of the Taygetus as a sort of 'cordon sanitaire' around Mani. The
raids, both from Turks and pirates, and the general decline in economic
conditions meant that in the late 17th century many Maniates migrated
to other parts of the Mediterranean or further afield. Italy was a favoured
destination as was Corsica, where the Itriani and Stephanopoli families
from Itilo settled repectively. From these came the unverifiable claims
that Mani families had links to the Medici and, even more unlikely, Napoleon
Buonaparte could trace his lineage back to Maniate predecessors. The first
Greek Orthodox church in Britain (in Soho Fields, London ) was founded
by Maniate emigrants, led by the priest Daniel Voulgaris in 1677 and a
century later Maniates are recorded as being settled in Florida, in 1767
by a certain Dr. Andrew Turnbull, where there is still a large Greek community.

The two parts
of the Mani developed slightly different styles of 'self government'.
In the North west Mani certain families began to dominate and the pattern
of the Kapetani (or 'Captains' - a Venetian term) took root. For example
during the seventeenth century the Mourtzinos-Troupakis clan (who had
some claim to being heirs of the Byzantine Imperial Paleaologi family)
began to dominate the area stretching inland from Kardamili, then called
Androuvitsa. Other centres for the kapetani grew up around Kitries/Doli,
Kastania, Platsa and Milia. Their fortified centres of power still exist
although the evidence of incidence of pyrgi (towers) is nowadays less
prevalent than in the Deep Mani - probably because in the nineteenth century
they were more relaxed in complying with Greek government edicts to dismantle
these warlike structures. Another reason was that clans and families in
this area were endogamous. That is they intermarried with other families
in the clan and rather like aristocracy everywhere made connections which
ensured the longevity of their hegemony. The visible signs of this were
the almost baronial castles the kapetani constructed for themselves. These
would often incorporate a pyrgos but were large complexes rather than
the individual towers of Kitta, Vathia and Lagia in Deep Mani. Probably
the best remaining example is Pano Kardamili. Although there was inter
village fighting in the Exo Mani there is little evidence of inter family
fighting and therefore not every family needed its own fortress.

In the Mesa
Mani there was a subtly different social order. Families still struggled
for power but here they were exogamous, wives being chosen from other
clans. Incest within the family was banned to the the level of seventh
cousins. Villages were divided into quarters or 'mahales' each dominated
by a family or clan. Although there were no chieftains, as in the Outer
Mani, there was a council of elders who would rule on feuds, or more often
the truces called between warring families. The feuding between these
was unremitting and vicious. The reasons for this are probably due to
the overpopulation of an impoverished environment. It is noticeable that
unlike most of the rest of Greece (there are other exeptions) there was
no dowry system - land was too scarce to leave to the vagaries of marriage
arrangements. Vendettas, ambushes, assassinations and on occasion a form
of open warfare bedevilled Mani and especially the Deep Mani. As each
family's war towers were often in extremely close proximity this took
on a savagery best likened to the worst forms of trench raiding in the
First World War.

So deeply
rooted was the cult of the vendetta in Deep Mani that there was a constant
grumbling level of violence. In the Maniate version of vengeance (oidikiomos)
it was not necessary to kill the one who had offended one's family but
instead it was quite common to choose another victim in order to better
'hurt' the opposing clan. The only exception to this 'collective' form
of vengeance was in the case of slander where vengeance had to be meted
out on the perpetrator. This open nature of the vendetta meant that it
was rarely closed and could rumble on for years and indeed decades. There
were ways of ending or mitigating the slaughter. 'Sinevgarma' was a truce
brought about whilst the appointed victim was in the company of a stranger.
The 'Fichiko' - or Truce of Forgiveness where a third party would get
the injured party to forgive the offenders and The 'Agapi' where an outsider
would intervene even if this was not requested by the warring parties.
Part of the problem was the deep superstitions regarding the dead - the
Maniates believed that, if not revenged, the spirit of the dead would
return to haunt their own family. The only ones seemingly immune from
this constant bloodshedding were priests and doctors - both of whom were
too useful to eliminate. Male children were dubbed 'guns' - the women
toiled in the fields and raised more 'guns' - they were not immune from
the violence and were sometimes killed, if not deliberately then in the
crossfire.

It is interesting
that evidence from Morritt and Leake tends to point to a more pro-active
role for women in the conflicts. Morritt mentions that in the late 18th
century in the Exo Mani women were often active in inter-clan raids and
were enthusiastic users of the fields set aside for target practise. Leake
wrote, "The women carry ammunition for their husbands, and it is
a point of honour not to shoot at them." He was also amused to find
that the women could be as useful with a musket as their men. At Skutari
he was challenged by the local chieftan Katzano's wife to put his hat
at a spot some 150 yards distant and watch her hit it with a musket ball.
As Leake only had the one hat and the lady sported two wounds from battle
the English agent sensibly took her at her word."

The whole
role of women in such a seemingly male dominated society has not been
explored from an historical perspective but Nadia Seremitakis' book "The
Last Word" - on the social and psychological role of women in
recent Deep Maniate society is recommended as a guide to this complex
area of study.

Many of the
western commentators on Mani in the early nineteeth century point to the
fact that whereas the Maniates would work together at the time of external
threat they were inclined to civil strife if left to their own devices.
As John Galt commented in 1812, "They make war, continually, with
each other, chief against chief, but whenever the Turks threaten with
subjugation they firmly unite." Leake had a slightly different
slant on this. He talked at length with the Turkish Kapitan Pasha, Hassan
Pasha, in 1805 at his base in Monemvasia - as Leake reported "It
seldom happened, he says, that when he wished to destroy a village, he
could not find some neighbouring village to assist him in the work, and
generally under the guidance of a priest, on condition of his having the
stones of the ruins as a perquisite." Indeed the main purpose
of the internicine warfare appears to have been to destroy the others'
towers and raise them to the ground. Like other vendetta dominated societies,
such as Corsica, the conflict was run on unwritten but rigid rules which
soon lost any original significance and became self perpetuating ritual.

The society
in the major Mesa Mani settlements were also divided between the Nikliani
and the Ahamnomeri. The Nikliani were the rulers could build tower houses
and made the running. The derivation of their name is unsure but there
is a contested theory that it is derived from the town of Nikli (near
present day Tripoli in the central Peloponnese). Nikli was mostly destroyed
by the Turks in the 1400s and the inhabitants could have taken refuge
in the Deep Mani. They would have brought with them their overtones of
feudalism from the Frankish period and replicated this in Mani with divisive
and violent results. The Ahamnomeri were, if not exactly in strict feudalistic
terms - they paid no rent for example - the serfs of the Nikliani. They
were forbidden to build dwellings over two stories high and were subservient
to the Nikliani. But there was no inherent rigidity in the system and
families and individuals could rise and fall between the two strata.

Wagstaff
and many others are sceptical of the Nikli refugees explanation believing
that the development of the clan based-tower dominated Mani settlement
patterns was more organic and really only took strong hold in the 17th
and 18th centuries when there was a natural rise in the population. There
is in fact little evidence of large influxes of population into Mani and
any slight shift in population may have been as localised as people leaving
the Malevri district (between Kelefa and Githeon) for the Mesa Mani. Indeed
the main use of Mani as a 'refuge' was by the Klephtic bands who would
temporarily use the area as a safe haven and then return to the central
Morea.

These societal
patterns were not exclusively divided along the Exo/Mesa Mani border.
This has only been a loose delineation changing throughout the centuries
and Langada in exo Mani had distinct family areas within the same village
rather like Kitta in the deep south. Areopolis (or as it was called until
the 1830s, Tsimova) was gradually dominated by the Mavromichalis clan
from their base at Limeni and when Leake visited it in 1805 he found the
locals made a clear distinction between themselves and the inhabitants
further south in the Mesa Mani. Part of the problem, certainly in Deep
Mani, was the overpopulation of the area. Foreign observers wondered at
the number of villages in Mani which was in direct contradiction of the
surrounding paucity of natural resources and Wagstaff has pointed out
that there was, slightly surprisingly, a far lower rate of settlement
desertion in Mani than for the Peloponnese as a whole.

A
map of Mani in the late 17th century from Bernard Randolph's The
Present State of the Morea 1689

The economy

We have few
documents concerning the economy of Mani in the early Ottoman centuries
and even what we know of the economy of Mani in the 17th and 18th centuries
is based mainly on foreign observers. The economy was, unsurprisingly,
primarily agricultural or exploited local resources. Although the Exo
Mani was rich in olive trees it was not until the 19th century that these
were introduced in any numbers into the Mesa Mani and they have hardly
made an enormous impact even to this day. The stock plants in that district
were grains, mainly sorghum or kolomabakia, a form of millet, lupins -
mainly used as animal feed but in extremis as human sustinence (and described
as the 'grapes of Mani'). Animals are difficult to number as most contemporary
observers failed to note the number of goats and other beasts - although
Evliya Celebi comments on the profusion of goats. Exports were relatively
common in the more prosperous Exo Mani, turpentine, hides and pine for
masts are listed by Leake and the small oak trees which grow in the area
produced both vallonea - a tanning agent and a bright crimson dye called
prinokoki which came from a small growth caused by a coccus insect
(Kermoccocus vermilio). The north west was also rich in silk
- the mulberry trees are still evident and Lord Carnarvon writes of sleeping
uncomfortably in Kardamili being bitten by countless fleas and bugs, " and
above me on a hanging mat, a very world of silk-worms."

But the harshness
of life in an over-populated and generally arid and unproductive area
meant that not surprisingly the Maniates turned to piracy which was pretty
endemic in the Mediterranean. There are claims that, rather like the Cornish
in Britain, the Maniates perfected the art of "wrecking" innocent
ships on their rocky shores. This may be doubted, for, prevalent as these
stories are, there is actually no historical proof that "wrecking"
(the art of luring ships onto rocks by lighting false fires) ever occured
in Cornwall and by inference one can surmise that the practice was equally
mythical in Mani. That said poor people living on rocky shores have always
been swift and often unmerciless in their taking advantage of any shipwrecks
that may present themselves to them. They were other tricks and tropes
in which the Maniates became adept, Bernard Randolph, an English trader
in the Levant, related in his Present State of the Morea
(1689) a Maniat ploy of gaining foreigners' trust

'Some
will be in Priests Habits, walking by the Sea side, with their Wallets,
in which they will have some Wine and Bread. Their Companions lye hid
behind the Bushes at some convenient Post. When any strangers come ashore,
who do not understand their language, the feigned Priests make signs to
them, shewing them their Bread and Wine, which they offer them for money,
by which the strangers being enticed from the Sea side (and it may be
to sit down and tast their Wine) the hidden Maniotts come and make their
Prey. The Priests will seem sorry and endeavour to make the strangers
believe they were altogether ignorant of any such design. So a white Flagg
is put out, and a Treaty held with the Ship for their Ransome. The Priests
endeavour to moderate the Price, shewing a great deal of respect for their
Companions who are clothed in Turkish Habits. Many Ships have been thus
served'.

One suspects
that the Priests were not 'feigned'. Sir Paul Reyaut's party were thus
conned and '… paid dear for visiting the Maniotts'. The
English Ambassador in Constantinople, The Earl of Winchelsea, complained
bitterly to the Ottoman officials but it was, unsurprisingly, to no avail.

Itilo became
famed as a slave trade centre gaining itself the appellation of "Great
Algiers" and Skoutari on the eastern coast gained itself a lesser
if similar reputation. How much seaborne piracy ever became the dominant
occupation in Mani is difficult to assess as, rather naturally, few records
exist and the locals often blamed others in their defense. In fact it
suited the Maniates to have the reputation of being pirates and brigands
and it was a belief they often promulgated to their own benefit. John
Morritt reported in 1795 that his party had come across a number of small
Maniate craft reputedly trading along the shores of the Morea, as he commented
on these traders they were

" not
without the imputation of piracy: and we learnt from them that it was
their policy to keep up as much as possible the alarming reputation which
the fears and hatred of the Turks had conferred upon them".

Regardless
of this most evidence points to piracy being a mainstay of the Maniate
economy - the peninsula is well suited to this pursuit - its shores are
rocky, its ports few and then mostly unsafe, except to small craft sailed
by experienced locals. Morritt again described the craft used by the Maniates.

" Boats called
here Trattas, abounded in every creek: they are long and narrow like canoes;
ten, twenty and even thirty men, each armed with rifle and pistols, row
them with great celerity, and small masts with Latine sails are also used
when the winds are favourable."

Finally from
a defensive point of view the Maniates' own settlements are mainly inland
on the small plateau that hugs the western flanks of the Taygetus and
Sangias mountains and therefore they were relatively immune from others
unwise enough to attack them.

The influence
of foreign powers

The Venetians
were extremely active in the area and appear to have been, at times, equal
rivals to the Turks for Mani. They supported and encouraged rebellions
and resistance in Mani. A number of wars between the Ottomans and Venice
occurred after the fall of Constantinople Between 1463 and 1479 they asked
for and, as reported above, got help from the local Greek leader Korkodilos
Kladas and appointed "rettori" to rule Mani whilst the Turks
were otherwise engaged - but this Venetian period was short lived. This
was repeated in the 1480s and for a time the Venetians nominally held
Mani as a protectorate but their constant meddling usually ended up with
the Maniates coming out the losers and as the Turks similarly failed to
keep a permanent grip on the area, Mani became an eternal buffer zone.
In the 1570s the vast religious war between the western powers and the
Ottomans enticed the Maniates back into the fray and although the victory
of Don John of Austria at Lepanto seemed to auger well the Maniate rebels
under the Mellisini brothers were crushed by Turkish forces.

The western
powers continued to take an interest in Mani and vice versa. Groups from
Mani went in search of possible rich and powerful western protectors.
One curious interlude in 1618 was the claim to the Mani by Charles de
Gonzagues, Duc de Nevers, a member of the French aristocracy. This was
initiated and encouraged by the Maniates and was based on his lineage
which, it was claimed, he could trace back to the Paleaologi, the family
who supplied the last rulers of the Byzantine Empire and the Despots of
the Morea based at Mistra. The Duc de Nevers sent various agents into
Mani, both to elicit support from the locals and to take notes on the
area. They completed a survey of the Mani but whether the reports of the
desiccated nature of his distant appanage put him off isn't recorded but
nothing came of it. Certainly the Turks took the intelligence that a westerner
was taking interest in Mani seriously and made a number of raids into
Mani.

In the 1670
the Turks made a concerted efforts to dominate Mani and swept through
the Exo Mani with a large force of troops retaking the key castle of Zarnata
and rebuilding it and the site at Kelefa opposite Itilo. Evliya Celebi,
Turkish travel writer and court official accompanied this expedition and
was obviously delighted that Mani had rejoined the Ottoman Empire. Many
Maniates were less pleased with the sight of Turkish garrisons and the
imposition of Ottoman taxes and left for safer shores such as large parts
of the populations of Itilo and Proastio who moved to Corsica and Italy
respectively. But the Venetians were waiting in the wings.

For a some
while after the fall of Byzantine Mistra the Serene Republic tenaciously
held on to their twin fortresses of Modon (Methoni) and Coron (Koroni)
on the tips of the Messenian peninsular to the west of Mani - "the
Eyes of the Republic". Although ousted by the Turks in 1500 from
Methoni and losing their final toeholds in the Turko-Venetian War of 1537-40,
the Venetians always hankered after their lost Peloponnesian territories
and in 1685, taking advantage of Ottoman attention to their northern Danubian
borders, they invaded and seized the Peloponnese under the command of
Morosini. They ruled the area for the next thirty years but were sensible
enough to leave the Maniates much to their own devices but did hold a
census and set up number of administrative districts; these were Zarnata
- which consisted of the Exo Mani, Bardugna - the lands of Vardounia bordering
to the north of the deep Mani and Chielefa & Passava which included
all the southern Mani.

Although
Christian, and therefore slightly preferable to the Turks, the Venetians
were never popular and when the Turks re-conquered the area the local
Greeks were apathetic to the point of inactivity when called upon to resist
the advance of the Ottoman Vezir Ali Pasha and his army. There were, in
fact, contemporary Venetian complaints of Maniat treachery.

Indeed in
his contemporary account of the campaign of Ali Pasha's inexorable advance
through the Morea in 1715, the Frenchman Benjamin Brue noted on the 5th
of August. " the same day there arrived in the camp two
bishops and several Greeks, all Maniots, a deputation from Upper and Lower
Mani which forms together a sort of Republic, to submit to the Porte and
ask for its protection ". Part of the deal was that the
Maniates would ensure that the forts of Zarnata and Kelefa would be handed
over to the Turks in return for recognition of Maniate privileges. This
happened on the 18th August 1715 when the Venetian garrisons were allowed
to withdraw in boats supplied by the Kapitan Pasha or Turkish Admiral.
Which points to the Maniates actually conniving in the Venetian demise.
This local 'indifference' combined with the Venetians' own reluctance
and financial inability to strengthen the fortresses of the Morea including
the Mani forts of Zarnata and Kelefa meant that their defeat in 1715 was
ignominious and final. The period of Venetian rule left little trace in
Mani (though they gave Napflion, further north, its delightful architecture)
save some place names such as Malta near Zarnata and the prevalence of
Venetian style campanile or belltowers on many churches. The Maniates
were again under the titular rule of the Ottomans though appear to have
come to some sort of accommodation with them which left the Mani relatively
independent of the Porte.

The relative
peace of the Venetian occupation was combined with a tightly colonial
outlook to trade. In fact once the Venetians had left there was an increase
in economic activity (and one suspects, piracy and brigandry) meaning
that in the 18th century there was a good deal of wealth especially in
the kapetani dominated north western Mani. This was a time when there
was an upsurge in church building, often of small scale family chapels
and monasteries and the practice of repainting churches appears to have
flourished in the middle part of the 18th century in Exo Mani. There is
a boast, which can still be heard today, that the Turks "Never silenced
the bells of Mani".

The
Vardia (watchtower) above the settlement of Pano Kardamili - centre of
power of the Mourtzinos-Troupakis clan during the 18th century - and a
folkloric dragon - embellishing the walls of their fortress

In Ottoman
dominated Greece it was illegal to ring church bells or construct bell
towers. These strictures were probably never as draconian as the letter
of the law might suggest and rather like the rule against non-Muslims
riding horses often ignored as there was always room for bribery. However
there are a large number of late 18th/early 19th century bell towers,
or campaniles, in Mani and very few in the rest of the Peloponnese. These
telescopic structures are particularly prevalent in the Outer or Exo Mani,
more often than not additions to previous church buildings. The kapetani
dominated areas of Mani were generally religiously corporate and it is
usual that the central church in each location was graced by these extremely
visual expressions of Maniate independence.

In the Mesa
Mani there is a relative dearth of campanile, the only examples I can
recall being in Areopoli, the area around Githeon and at Ochia in the
southern Cavo Grosso. The reason for this is presumably due to the division
of communities into warring families and the concomitant concentration
on small family chapels. Building large central churches needs wealthy
patronage and a willing and large congregation. It is rumoured that the
present day construction of a very large church in the centre of Kitta
is to bring together the communities of Upper and Lower Kitta who still
aren't speaking to one another over a century after the last recorded
open warfare in that village.

The Orlov
Rebellion

The Turks
kept a wary eye over Mani - which was probably sensible. In the late eighteenth
century the major power grappling with the Turks was Tsarist Russia under
the expansionist policies of Catherine the Great. Although the Russians
were making heavy weather of expanding into the Crimea and other territories
north of the Black Sea they had imperialist ambitions way beyond their
abilities. They cast their eye to Greece and realised that with the steep
decline in Venetian power in the area and the resulting power vacuum that
they could encourage rebellion which could seriously distract Ottoman
attention from the Danubian frontiers.

In 1766 a
Russian envoy, Papazolis, was sent by Catherine to foment revolt. The
Maniates, after so many disappointments over the years, sensibly asked
for physical Russian support and two of Catherine's favourites (she had
quite a few…), the Orlov brothers Alexei and Grigori were sent to
Mani in 1770 with five ships and a thousand men. Hardly a large force,
a fact which wasn't missed by the Maniates. The Mavromichalis family of
Limeni and other local leaders met the Orlov's at the monastery of Dekoulou
near Itilo and cooked up a plan to advance northwards and for a joint
attack on Koroni at the end of the Messenian peninsula. The details are
exciting but unimportant - the result was as ever. The Russians, who had
hardly put many resources into the affair pulled out as soon as the cause
appeared lost and the Maniates appear to have squabbled with everyone.
Leake writing thirty five yars after the event, but doubtless having done
his research, that the rebellion failed, " in consequence
of their disorderly, or cowardly, conduct".

To the east
of the Taygetus the Maniates advanced via Vardounia on Mistra which fell
after a nine day siege and was sacked never to fully recover. The insurgents
got as far as the approaches of Tripolitza in central Morea before being
repulsed by local forces and a hastily recruited army of Albanians. The
retreat was all the way back to Mani. The Turks introduced another group
of Albanians into the Vardounia area who promptly turned on their masters
and threatened the local populations. It was only after another Turkish
army crushed the Albanians in 1779 and after much destruction and bloodletting
that something close to the status quo was reasserted.

The savagery
of the Orlov uprising left visible scars on the landscape and presumably
on the souls of the survivors. John Morritt of Rokesby who visited Mani
25 years later reported,

"In
the war conducted with Russian money, the Mainiots were found so
troublesome to the Turks, that a combined attack was made on their country
by the fleet under the Capoudan Pasha, which landed troops upon their
coast and the forces of Morea, which marched at the same time from Misitra
[Mistra] The result of the attack by sea was pointed out
to me near Cadamyle; a heap of whitening bones in a dell near the town,
the remains of the Turks, who after suffering the severest privations
were not so fortunate as the rest in finding a refuge in their fleet "

The period
of the Beys

Thus it was
that the Turks decided to reintroduce, or interestingly as some historians
put it 're-impose', the office of Bey of Mani and let the area have a
form of self government. This, it must be pointed out, was not uncommon
within the Ottoman empire. Other frontier provinces such as Wallachia,
Transylvania and Dubrovnik all had some form of self rule and paid a tribute
to the Sublime Porte. Some observers' claim that Mani was completely independent
but in reality the Ottomans' merely passed responsibility for Mani from
the Pasha in Tripolitza to the Admiral of the Turkish fleet - The Kapitan
Pasha. The post of Bey was was given to one of the local Kapetani, both
terms and 'offices' that had held over from before the Venetian occupation.
There were eight Beys between 1776 and 1821 - mostly from the north western
kapetani, sometimes from those around Githeon and only once from the Mesa
Mani and then from the dominant Mavromichalis family of Limeni.

The Beys
were expected to organise the collection of taxes and to keep order in
Mani and if they displeased the Sublime Porte then the Turks were quick
to send a frigate or two to enforce their will. When Sir William Gell
visited the Bey Antoni Grigorakis at Kitries in 1804 he remarked on the
presence of a Turkish flotilla in the harbour which was there in order
to pressurize the handing over of taxes and during the period raids by
Turkish frigates on coastal locations were not uncommon.

Indeed the
Turks were quick to depose Beys who could not maintain the required order
and became so annoyed with some of their Maniate Beys that on not one
but two occasions they lured a Bey on board a ship for 'friendly' discussions
only to behead or imprison them in the time honoured Ottoman method of
rewarding recalcitrant minions (you might have thought the Mani Beys would
have got wise to this trope!). Some Beys were active against the Turks
but most had to tread the thin line between appeasing their rulers and
allowing their rumbustious fellow Maniates to continue their lawless activities.
Leake who observed the system from both sides commented that he thought
the system had the ability to work well if pressure was maintained on
the Beys. While he was there in 1805 the local Pasha was extremely active
and the area was orderly, the Turks happy to rake in the tribute and the
Mani enjoyed a modicum of independence. However he felt that this was
unlikely to work in a wider Greek context commenting" but
I fear that Turkish anarchy, bigotry, greediness of gain, and cruelty,
render it impracticable."

Despite
the odd beheading, deposition or imprisonment (and not to mention the
approbation of their Maniate brethren) there was no shortage of candidates
for the post of Bey as it wielded much power - and naturally - tax collecting
abilities with all the peculatory advantages these brought with them.
The Beys also controlled the monopolies of trade in such lucrative exports
as olive oil and vallonea.

The period
coincided with a rise in klephtic power in the Morea. These bands became
ever more bold and caused enormous problems for trade and travel in the
area - not just for the Turks but for the local kapoi or Greek landowners
and businessmen. The tales told of such men as Zacharias (described by
Leake as a robber and the "terror of the Morea") and Kolokotrones
are now imbued with a rosy romantic hue. This is because those who wrote
of them and created the songs which celebrated their exploits did so at
a distance of some years and in the light of their elevation to the pantheon
of Greek heroes or precursors of the War of Independence. In the case
of Theodore Kolokotrones he wrote his own self aggrandising memoirs after
the War of Independence - which - though they follow the bare course of
events relatively accurately the expressed motives and rationale for his
marauding he provides are dubious and obfuscatory. In fact the Klephts'
savagery was rarely confined to their Turkish overseers and was often
aimed at one another and other Greeks. Sober academic modern research
such as that by John C. Alexander (Brigandage and public order in the
Morea, 1685-1806. Athens. 1985) has delineated a far more complex
picture of those lawless days than that celebrated in 'Robin Hood' style
klephtic ballads of the early 19th century.

Piracy also
continued relatively unabated. Leake reported seeing a number of beached
Maniate trattas (which he described as being smaller versions of Turkish
galleys) at Monemvasia in 1805 which had been captured by the Turks and
had to avoid Pyrgos in Deep Mani as the locals were rather anti-British
since a pirate tratta with a crew from that village had been seized by
a British naval ship. Nearly all the western powers tried to supress the
Maniates piratical exploits. In 1795 John Sibthorp, the botanist, on his
way back to England called in at Koroni where apart from being hansomely
entertained by the local bey he observed the Venetian brig Merope
which had just come from, " an unsuccessful cruise against
the pirates on the coast of Maina". John Morritt who was in Mani
at exactly the same time reported the Kapetani of Platsa, Christea, quite
openly boasting of seizing a French merchantman.

Towards the
end of the Turkokratia there were increasing links between the Maniates
and the nascent movement for Greek Independence. The 1770 Orlov Rebellion
in the Morea had started things rolling and the example of the French
Revolution came hard on its heels. The political landscape was full of
both revolutionary zeal and nascent Greek nationalism and the area seems
to have swarmed with foreign agents. The revolutionary French sent the
Stephanopoli Uncle and Nephew, Dimo and Nicolo, descended from the refugees
from Itilo, to report on conditions in Mani with a stiring letter calling
them to arms from the pen of Napoleon Buonaparte. There was the possibility
for a while, when Buonaparte harboured Levantine ambitions, that this
revolutionary fervour would translate to the Morea.

For the British,
uneasily allied to the Porte, J.P.Morier was active in the Peloponnese
and there were British complaints of French gun running into Maniat ports.
It is sometimes overlooked that that thoroughly exact travel writer, topographer
and classicist William Martin Leake, who travelled extensively in Greece
in the first decades of the 19th century, was sent there primarily as
a British military observer and advisor to the Turks in their defence
against the French and ended up a Lt. Colonel. John Galt, the writer,
who visited the area around Marathonisi (modern Githeon) in 1809 was quite
splenetic in his ignorant complaint that the French seemed to have upper
hand and that there had been no British Agents in the area. There were
also contacts between the Maniates and the Philiki Etairia, the secret
society which plotted (often rather ineptly) to create a Greek uprising.

This late
18th century - early nineteenth century period saw a number of western
observers penetrating into Mani. The strategic importance of Mani with
regard to the trade and military/naval routes which skirted Cape Matapan
had already brought some visitors. The earliest recorded is Cyriaco of
Ancona - an Italian merchant who showed a humanist interest in the remains
of the ancient Greeks. In the 1440s he recorded an number of ancient ruins
in Mani which he must have circumnavigated a number of times. Unfortunately
most of his notebooks were accidentally burned but some of his Mani drawings
have survived including one of a grave stele
used in the facia of Ag. Iannis at Keria - now sadly stolen by art
thieves in 1998.

In the late
18th century many young gentlemen indulged in 'The Grand Tour' which whisked
callow but rich youths around the major cultural sights of southern Europe
visiting the art galleries and doubtless the bordellos of the Mediterranean.
Greece and the Ottoman Empire were not often visited both from a reason
of access and more likely lack of comfort. With the Napoleonic Wars closing
off most of continental Europe to young footloose Englishmen some strayed
further into the Balkans. Byron is the most famous example. He never visited
Mani, but others did. The recollections of Morritt of Rokeby, John Sibthorp
the great botanist, William Gell, John Galt, Charles Cockerell and the
Earl of Carnarvon give a picture of Mani during this turbulent period.
Most are readable and some entertaining and in the way of travellers of
all ages they bring along their own cultural baggage and prejudices.

Mostly they
were impressed by the Maniates and the general state of the area. Both
Morritt and Cockerell comment on the general air of order and wealth in
the Exo Mani. As Charles Cockerell observed in 1812 near Doli, "Instead
of the deserted languid air of other parts of Greece, here was a vigorous
prosperity. Not an inch of available ground but was tilled and planted
with a careful husbandry. Poor and rocky as the soil was. The villages
were neater and less poverty stricken and the population evidently much
thicker than in the rest of Greece. The faces of the men were cheerful
and open; the women handsomer, and their costume more becoming".
Equally impressive was the almost feudal nature of the society, with the
kapetani having power of life and death over their populations. Cockerell
again, "In no part of Europe at any rate, if indeed in the world,
could one find such singular scenes or come upon a state of society so
exactly like that of our ancient barons".

There was
also a tendency to make tendentious links and parallels between the contemporary
Maniates and their ancient predecessors. Most of the travellers had some
interest in the ancients and had expectations that they would see the
ancient Greek in the modern. If the Greeks in Ottoman dominated Greece
generally disappointed the western travellers they were quick to make
allusions between the ancient Spartan Lacedemonians and the Maniates.
The martial spirit was one link, the other rather more dubious and tendentious
was the long tresses sported by the Mani warriors which had Charles Cockerell
reporting that the Maniates," dressed their hair trailing
down their backs like the descendants of the Spartans who combed their
hair before going into battle," and John Galt echoing him with
"They all wear their hear long and flowing a peculiarity of the
Spartans ". The fact that this hair style was prevalent
in many parts of Greece and Albania at the time seems to have been conveniently
overlooked by our western travellers.

These foreign
travellers ('Franks' to the Greeks) moved across Mani by permission of
the local kapetani. Even when (the then) Captain William Leake visited
Mani in April 1805 there were certain parts of the exo Mani he dared not
traverse on foot as most the kapetani were in dispute with Antoni Grigoraki,
the present Bey of Mani. Leake was a precise man who kept pedantically
exact timings of his perambulations. This can be explained by his primary
need to provide military information but one suspects that winding his
watch was his first and favourite act on rising. Leake travelled with
a small retinue and the vast amounts of baggage our ancestors felt it
necessary to hump around with them in vain attempts to recreate the appurtenances
of Hampstead study and drawing room in their rude foreign surroundings.
Such sights of conspicuous consumerism were bound to excite the rapacity
of the Maniates. As Leake was told by Tubaki (Polikos Tubakis), a Deep
Mani chieftain, "If the Bey had not given such precise orders
concerning you, how nicely we should have stripped you of all your baggage."

In fact Leake
was there at a time when both the Turks and the local Greek kapoi were
about to finally lose their temper with the Klephtic bands. After a number
of outrages and much scurrying diplomacy the Klephts were hounded out
of their centres of power in the mountains of central Morea. Zacharias
was assassinated at Tseria in Mani in 1805 where he was playing one Kapetani
off against another. A Greek by the name of Koukeas was the assassin and
the the Turks lopped off his limbs for his pains as they had wanted to
capture Zacharias alive - such Ottoman whimsicality was so common a practise
that one wonders how they ever persuaded anyone to do their dirty work
for them. Kolokotrones was forced into Mani after a number of skirmishes
in Messenia and Arcadia. He took refuge at Kastania with the Douraki clan
and helped them in their squabbles with the Kitrinaris tribe just to the
north. Throughout this period Mani was the safe haven for Klephts who
would hole up there until the pursuit had gone cold. In this instance
such had been Kolokotrones' annoyance to the Turks and kapoi that they
arranged for him to be assassinated. He was forewarned and slipped away
to the coast and took a boat off to the Ionian Islands.

Two
portraits of Petrobey Mavromichalis

The extirpation
of the Klephts in 1805-6 made little difference to the eventual result.
15 years later the general malaise of the Turkish hold on their empire
lead to a general uprising against the Turks with the Mavromichalis clan
leading the pallikares (warriors) of Mani out into the wider Morea.